We’re 18 days away from another VMworld in Las Vegas, and it’s going to be another amazing year, with a packed agenda crammed with sessions on our SDDC stack, including vSAN, NSX and vSphere, in addition to VMware on AWS and Cloud Foundation, all being my favorite topics at the moment. You’ll also find me discussing Cross-Cloud Architecture along with Adrian Roberts and Victor Sandoval, in the Ask the vCloud Air Network Cloud Experts [LHC1566PU] session which is on Monday at 12.30 so feel free to bring something to eat and drink for an hour of technical discussion!

I was also fortunate enough to be invited to the Virtustream Global Developer conference in Florida last week, and one of the topics I presented was titled ‘Cloud Momentum: Cross-Cloud Services and Architecture’. I must say that the team at Virtustream have some amazing talent so be sure to check them out at VMworld!

While I’m on the subject of Cross-Cloud architecture, there is a real challenge that I think customers are trying to solve. Firstly, cloud consumers have choice, but with that it’s inevitable that things don’t always turn out to be clear-cut. For example, let’s say we have a customer that wants to migrate their workload to the cloud. Most of their applications today have a traditional deployment with a database back-end, reliance on certain versions of Microsoft SQL and legacy dependencies which makes scale difficult. These traditional applications are not going to suit Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, but with VMware on AWS they can expand their existing vSphere infrastructure that they have on-premises, to an AWS data center.

As customers then introduce cloud native applications to their organization, they can take advantage of AWS services such as S3 and DynamoDB. What makes this relationship so unique is there traditional workloads can be placed side-by-side in the same AWS region and availability zone (AZ). This avoids network traffic having to occur over a VPN or Direct Connect, and they can keep the traffic internal to the AWS network. Taking things one step further, workloads can easily be moved using vMotion from their on-premises data center to AWS and visa-versa.

There will be much more to reveal at VMworld where you’ll hear the latest news on Cross-Cloud services and architecture.

This has been an exciting time for the IT industry. At VMworld US 2016 (August 29th 2015) we had the announcement of VMware Cloud Foundation becoming an integral part of IBM SoftLayer and then we had the news of the strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware (October 13th 2016). VMware Cloud Foundation is a shift in cloud infrastructure that enables the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). This is significant because what we know as the SDDC, with technology such as VMware Horizon, NSX and Virtual SAN, can now be consumed and offered by service providers in a unique way.